Indigenous Australian Runners Making the Most of Altered Plans

Kieran de Santis was one of eight Indigenous Australian runners to make the trip to New York for the now-canceled marathon.

Kieran de Santis is a pretty good candidate for the runner who traveled farthest for the now-canceled New York Marathon: the trip from Milikapiti, a dusty fly-in village of a few hundred people on a remote island off the north coast of Australia, is an epic feat of endurance in its own right.

Kieran de Santis was one of eight Indigenous Australian runners to make the trip to New York for the now-canceled marathon. Photo by Steven Pearce

But de Santis’s journey is even more remarkable than its length indicates. He’s one of eight Indigenous Australians who have spent the past nine months training under the tutelage of former marathon world champ and world record holder Rob de Castella as part of the Indigenous Marathon Project, now in its third year. The program’s ambitious goals: change lives, spearhead change in troubled communities – and perhaps, years or even decades down the road, mine the untapped endurance potential of Australia’s Indigenous peoples to unearth a champion marathoner.

The goals for this year, though, changed very suddenly with Sandy’s onslaught and the last-minute announcement of the race’s cancellation. While rumors swirled of impromptu marathon-length runs around Central Park, de Castella and his team quickly decided to spend their remaining days in New York volunteering with the relief effort.

After all, Australians are no strangers to the carnage that tropical storms can wreak: another member of the team, Grace Eather, saw her home community of Maningrida leveled by Cyclone Monika in 2006, for example.“The

situation in New York is absolutely devastating and far worse than anything we had imagined, with thousands of people still without shelter, food, water and power,” de Castella said. The runners are looking into options ranging from digging through debris to cooking meals.

The team didn’t leave Australia until Thursday, after the initial decision to hold the marathon had been confirmed. That means the tens of thousands of dollars they raised in Australia to fund the trip are irrevocably spent – there will be no return trip for these runners to a spring marathon or to New York next year. Instead, they’ll look for a marathon back in Australia next year – possibly one in Tasmania in January.

Like most of his teammates, de Santis had almost no running experience when he signed on for the project. But after seeing drug and alcohol use take over the lives of many of his friends and family, the 20-year-old was determined to choose a healthier path. His father had committed suicide in front of him, and he too had struggled with marijuana. “I’m a devil when I have alcohol inside me,” he admits. “I know it the next morning.”

When de Santis joined the project, he put away his bong – an unpopular decision among his peers. “My friends want me to be a nobody like them,” he says. “But I want to be a somebody.” His goal: to use sports as a way to lead kids in Milikapiti toward a healthier lifestyle, a goal furthered by the Marathon Project’s policy of having all the runners complete a Certificate in Health and Leisure during their training so that they’re qualified to work as sports and recreation managers back in their communities.

Still, the path hasn’t been easy. De Santis pounded out 4-mile loops around his island village twice a day to get fit, but also struggled with interruptions. In July, he injured his ankle; in August, his mother kicked him out of the house after a dispute, and he started smoking again. In September, the day before a crucial 30-K time trial outside the desert town of Alice Springs, which would determine which runners qualified to go to New York, he received word that a close cousin had committed suicide. To get through it all, he had explained a few weeks before the time trial, “I just need to keep running – every day.”

He did, and he made it to New York. De Castella had selected the Big Apple because “it’s about the biggest contrast you can get” from the runners’ home communities. Before the first group of Indigenous Marathon Project runners made the trip in 2010, de Castella recalled, one them had said to him, “I hear the buildings are so big in New York that you can’t even see the sky.” This year’s team still got to see the skyscrapers – and they also saw that even the biggest cities are vulnerable to nature’s fist. The cancellation changed the trip, but it didn’t ruin it.

“This is a decision that we need to deal with, and that’s what IMP is all about,” de Castella said. “Sometimes it’s some of the hardest things in life that teach us the most and enable us to grow and be better people.”